Burning by design
The Los Angeles wildfires burning today reveal more than a natural disaster—they expose a governance catastrophe of our own design. As flames consume neighborhoods and displace communities, we confront an uncomfortable truth: our wildfire crisis isn't a technology problem, but a systemic failure that illuminates deeper questions about institutional adaptation in an age of accelerating climate threats.
The numbers tell a devastating story: 62 million acres burned in a decade, while we maintain just eight MAFFS (modular air fire fighting systems—tech that transforms military planes into firefighting tankers) units for an entire nation's emergency response. This stark disparity between threat and capability reflects three interlocking institutional failures that perpetuate our crisis:
First, we've engineered artificial scarcity into our emergency response systems. The MAFFS program exemplifies this self-imposed constraint—elegant engineering trapped within a regulatory framework that ensures its inadequacy. Eight units requiring 24-hour activation windows, designated as "last resort" capabilities yet deployed in eight of the last ten years. We're running last-ditch efforts at operational tempo while maintaining the fiction that they're backup resources.
Second, we've created a privatization paradox where market dominance flows not from superior capabilities but from regulatory capture. Companies like United Aero and Neptune Aviation work with artificially scarce pilot pools. Firefighting-pilot requirements are incredibly demanding: 1,500 total flight hours, with specific requirements like 100 hours of agricultural time, 200 hours in mountain terrain, and 100 hours of single-engine seaplane time. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have requirements, but rather, as with most positions in the US Gov, we’ve leaned too deep into credentialism and requirements. Happen to have a crew of pilots and want to start your own aerial firefighting company? It’ll require five years of compliance work and $10 million in capital—not due to technical complexity, but because we've designed approval processes that worship process over outcome. Despite autonomous vehicles solving for both lack of pilot supply and cost, FAA Part 137 regulations make this innovation impossible. Once again, the technology to fight fires with unmanned aerial vehicles with more accurate retardant dropping exists, but regulation has choked out this solution.
Third, we suffer from prevention paralysis. NEPA regulations strangle controlled burns—our most effective prevention tool—while we pay premium rates to private contractors for emergency response. This perverse incentive structure rewards crisis management while actively impeding crisis prevention, guaranteeing escalating costs and blocking genuine improvement.
The tragedy lies not in technical limitations but in institutional design. Companies like Anduril and Palantir could deploy transformative autonomous capabilities tomorrow. Yet we've constructed regulatory frameworks where smokejumpers risk their lives for $20/hour while billions flow to emergency response contractors—a process optimized for compliance rather than outcomes.
The crisis contains the seeds of its own solution. Forest management should evolve from cost center to economic engine through market-driven prevention. Local enterprises can convert cleared vegetation into biochar, transforming fuel management into revenue-generating activity that strengthens our land while sequestering carbon. These aren’t nominal changes, but an institutional revamp.
The path forward demands institutional transformation across multiple dimensions:
1. Regulatory modernization that maintains safety while empowering force multiplication through autonomous systems
2. Incentive realignment that rewards readiness over response and builds sustainable funding models for prevention
3. Market creation that transforms forest stewardship into an economic engine through biochar production.
Each burning acre in the American West represents not a technical limitation but a choice—a decision to maintain comfortable dysfunction rather than embrace necessary transformation.
The wildfire crisis is a solved problem, if we want it to be. The question is whether we can evolve our institutions fast enough to matter.
The fires illuminating our skies today light a path forward—if we have the courage to take it. This moment demands more than incremental reform. It requires reimagining how we design institutions for an era where the pace of environmental change outstrips our traditional adaptive capabilities. In this challenge lies a test not just of our technical innovation, but of our capacity for institutional revolution at scale.